Don't Look Back
by ambyr
Summary: Just how long has the Brotherhood been following Rogue? Beginning of X1. Arkansas doesn't look any different than Mississippi, except for being a little less damp.


"Are you sure you'll be all right?" Angie asked her for fifth time as she slowed the car at the two dusty cross streets that seemed to mark the downtown of Pine Spring. "Because I could just take you the rest of the way, after I check in on the kids. Or you could take our sofa for the night, and get a good start in the morning after breakfast."   
  
Marie, who had memorized the speech by then, shook her head. "Nah. I'll be fine. Just wait right here at the bus stop till it comes." She was too close to home to stop now, too worried about seeing a poster with her face on the faded bulletin board that was hanging across the street in front of the grocers. Besides, if she had to listen to Angie babble about her kids one more time, she'd have to do something drastic, like throw the wallet of pictures out the window. "My granny's expecting me, anyway," she added, hoping she wasn't too slow with the lie.   
  
"I just hate to see someone your age wandering around alone. World's just not safe these days. Are you sure? Just promise not to sleep on the bus," she finished, as Marie nodded impatiently. "Never know who'll grab your bags, or worse."   
  
"I promise," Marie said, fingers crossed where they were tangled in the straps of her knapsack. She didn't have anything worth stealing, and while she'd have problems if someone grabbed her, she didn't think they were the same ones that Angie was worried about. Shrugging her pack over her shoulder, she reached for the door. "Thanks for the lift, really. Would've been a hell of a walk." She gave Angie a little wave as she slammed the rusting car shut behind her before the chatty woman began worrying again, or, worse, tried to give her a good-bye hug.   
  
No one was waiting at the bus stop, though a thin blanket of cigarette butts coated the ground around it. Marie studied the time table in the fading twilight until she heard the car pull away behind her. Three hours until the next bus to Little Rock, which was more than three hours too long in a dump like this. Reaching in her knapsack for dinner, she found only an empty chip bag and a half of a chocolate bar. The grocers and even, bewilderingly, the gas station had "Closed" signs on their doors. Across the street, three men leaned against a whitewashed wall where "E rgreen Bar a d Gri l" fluttered weakly in neon. From the distance, their slow voices murmured incomprehensibly, rising and falling in tandem with their gestures.   
  
The timetable hadn't changed when Marie glanced back at it. She weighed hunger against fears of being recognized, sighed, and headed to the bar.   
  
The air outside had been heavy with humidity, but the air inside, hung with smoke, was thick enough to walk on. Coughing and blinking, she froze just inside the doorway. Someone shoved past her from behind, elbow banging against hers. She knew it was a him, and she knew he was here looking for. . .something. The memory from the brief contact hung tenuously as a cobweb in her mind, but it was enough to make her flinch.   
  
"Don't touch me," she hissed as he headed past her into the room, then bit her lip. Even if no one in the crowded bar had heard, she couldn't afford to flip out every time someone touched her. She thought of David, and wondered if she could afford not to.   
  
None of the six tables were empty, but she squirmed onto an empty barstool, feeling it creak beneath even her slight weight. She dithered over the menu taped to the unfinished pine bar until the barkeeper cleared his throat pointedly.   
  
"Just some buffalo wings," she told him, jerking her head up at the sound. Belatedly, she wondered if he was about to throw her out for her age. It didn't really look like the kind of place that would care about something like that, but then, she wasn't much of a judge.   
  
He grunted and squinted at her. "Thought you were younger. Got a local pale on tap. Want that, too?"   
  
"Yeah, that," Marie told him reflexively, then blinked as he turned away. She'd heard that travel made one look older, but she'd only just crossed the state line.   
  
∗ ∗ ∗   
  
The beer tasted terrible, but the chicken wings were worse without it, so she choked it down, trying to look like she drank it all the time. She almost did choke when someone cleared his throat right her ear, but she managed not to jump again.   
  
"Mind if I join you? Sorry about earlier." From his faded blue shirt and short, dusty blond ponytail, she recognized him as the man who'd walked into her at the door, but something about his voice was wrong. The scraps of memory she'd stolen from him teased at the back of her mind. She barely kept a scowl off her face as she shoved them away. She'd never heard him before, so why should it be strange if she didn't recognize his voice? She was only imagining things.   
  
"No," Marie told him, edging away as he slid onto the stool next to her.   
  
He spread his hands palms up in front of himself. "Hey, I said I was sorry. Not that terrifying, am I?"   
  
Marie shrugged. "Just don't like being touched, s'all."   
  
"Pretty woman like you, must spend a lot of time shoving people away, then."   
  
"Not really," she told him, looking away to trace the initials carved into the bar before her. The last wing sat, lonely, on her plate. Waiting at the bus stop had to beat being come onto by guys twice her age.   
  
"At least let me buy you a drink. Another one of whatever that is."   
  
"It's piss," she muttered.   
  
"All right, then." He laughed and turned towards the approaching bartender. She didn't hear what he said, but two clear glass bottles appeared in front of him. The labels had begun to fade, turning the garish red and green dyes into tasteful pastels.   
  
"I really should be going. There's a bus, and I wouldn't want to miss the bus, 'cause then I'd get stuck here."   
  
"When's the bus?"   
  
Her watch, it seemed, had stubbornly refused to move. "Two hours," Marie confessed. She hadn't meant to tell him that, but instead of stopping, she babbled on. "Unless it's early, which it probably will be. Or late. With my luck, it'll be late."   
  
It was embarrassing to realize that she was tipsy on one beer. Any freshman could do better than that. She stared at the splintering initials again. The E was still crooked. "I really should. . . ."   
  
"Drink this beer," he interrupted. "You really should drink this beer. You need to wash the piss out of your mouth, right? I promise this one's better. Come on," he said when she hesitated. "I'm going to be insulted if you don't even touch it."   
  
"And I should care why?" she shot back. He shook his head and laughed   
  
"There's my girl." She flinched again when he reached for the bottle and held it out to her. "Right. No touching." With an elaborate gesture, he set it down directly on the initials she had been examining. "So what's wrong with your luck?"   
  
"Just rotten," Marie told him, scowling at the bottle. Of course she shouldn't drink more, but, she decided, she wasn't about to let herself be licked by one beer. "Rotten, rotten, rotten."   
  
"Yeah?" He watched her intently as she took a gulp. He had pretty eyes, she was surprised to notice, sort of a golden brown. The beer did taste better, but maybe that was just because it was her second one.   
  
"Well, I hitched a ride with this guy a few days back, see, and. . ."   
  
∗ ∗ ∗   
  
"It all goes back to this guy, see?" she told the man, who had finally introduced himself as Ron sometime in the middle of an impossibly complicated story about how he'd been thrown out of his last job. Her fourth beer teetered dangerously to one side as she reached for it, but she managed to keep it upright long enough to take another sip by grabbing at the peeling end of the label. "He, we'd been going, oh." She furrowed her brow. "A long time. And then we kissed, and it wasn't. . .we broke up." Even drunk, there were some things she knew better than to say.   
  
"Must've been a bad kisser. Real bad," said Ron, leaning casually against the bar with one leg hooked over the lower rung of her stool. Even with his heavyset figure, he managed to make the gesture look graceful, Marie thought fuzzily to herself.   
  
"No, he wasn't. I, he." She shrugged helplessly, eyeing the peanut shells that huddled near the base of the bar. They piled into a heap right below her stool, as though someone had been sweeping up and forgotten the dustpan.   
  
"He didn't like the way you kissed?" Something in his tone made Marie look up sharply, trying to focus, but he was only smiling at her.   
  
"Yeah," she said, shocked to feel a tear slipping off her face. It missed the beer and slid down her knuckles. "Yeah."   
  
"Hey, now. You can't be that bad." When she didn't answer, he shook his head. "Looks like you've had enough. Your bus should be here soon anyway. Let me walk you outside."   
  
She ignored the arm he offered her, but she slid off her stool and followed him out of the bar without protesting. The room had mostly emptied, but it still helped to have someone clearing her way for her, if only because she didn't seem to be walking quite as straight as usual.   
  
The air outside still sagged under the weight of the humidity, but it felt gentle against her lungs after so long in the smoke. She took a few grateful breaths, wishing her head would clear as quickly as her lungs.   
  
"No bus," Ron observed as he led her across the two lane street. Marie, who had caught a glimpse of her reflection in the store window behind the bus stop, wasn't listening. Something was wrong. Her face was too sharp, with none of the thin remnants of baby fat clinging around her cheeks and chin that she was so used to scowling at, and there were lines she was sure hadn't been there before. Focused on the reflection, she almost stumbled over the curb.   
  
"Careful, careful," Ron told her as she caught herself before he could try to catch her. She turned away from the glass. Maybe she was seeing things, or maybe the window just needed washing.   
  
"'m'fine." She leaned careful against the bus stop sign. "You don't need to wait with me, y'know." Halfway through, she stopped to yawn.   
  
"No," Ron said, "because that's your bus, unless I miss my guess." She squinted as he pointed down the road, and thought she could make out the faint glare of headlights in the distance.   
  
"Yeah. So. Uhh, thanks. For the beers, and the rest. The listening."   
  
"Anytime. Maybe we'll do it again sometime," he said, smiling so she'd know it was a joke. "You never know. I move around a lot, too. Before you go, though. . . ."   
  
She turned to look at him when he fell silent. "Yeah?"   
  
Before she could stop him, he bent down and kissed her. For the briefest moment, it tasted only like beer and salt and cigarettes, and then she felt his soul sliding out between his lips. Trying to follow it, his tongue, supple and slimy, pressed against her mouth. With a muffled yelp, she pushed him away. He stumbled and leaned against the back of the splintering wooden bench, his earlier grace gone. Even in the dim light of the street lamp, he looked a bit off-color. She stared at him in horror.   
  
"Don't look that way," he told her, voice wavering between several octaves. "You kiss fine, whatever he said."   
  
Marie shook her head, and, as the bus's breaks squealed behind her, turned and ran.   
  
He waited for the bus to pull away, clinging to the little strength he still had, before he let the form he wore finish slipping away. Mystique moved more slowly than usual, but she still smiled as she walked away from the town. _Oh, Erik. I've found her, and she'll do just fine_   
  
∗ ∗ ∗   
  
In the morning, Marie's mouth tasted worse than her first beer, but her reflection in the window of the bus was reassuringly normal and young. Even so, she took no chances at the next bar.   
  
"Water," she told the bored young woman behind the counter. "Just water." 


End file.
